the native sky on an exiled spirit
by LoquaciousQuark
Summary: She will not leave him alone. A kmeme fill about accidental touches that spans the entirety of the Fenris romance. Hawke/Fenris, complete.


**A/N:** A kmeme fill. Original prompt: _Playing through again today, I was reminded that my f!Hawke is always seeming to bump into doorways, walls, and also Fenris (I have poor steering, okay), but somehow not the rest of the companions._

_I'd love to see a fic where a genuinely sort of clumsy f!Hawke (turns too fast and runs into doorframes, gets distracted and walks into walls, sort of thing - less uncoordinated falling over own feet, more fast and distractable) is, during the first or second act, taking advantage of her well-known habit of collisions to get away with frequently touching Fenris on 'accident'._

_Fenris snarls but puts up with it because she clearly can't help it, and, though he'd never admit it, even rather looks forward to the next time that nicely-shaped body impacts his... if this ends up somewhere smutty, so much the better._

_Extra love for him finally snapping at some point when her swaying hips bump against him yet again as she goes past and he yells about it for a moment, then just presses her against the nearest wall and ravishes her._

_Again, not looking for a clumsy Hawke of the bumbling sort (I just can't see Hawke being truly bumbling), but more the too-quick-for-her-own-good, easily distractable sort. Class unimportant. If it makes the difference between fill and no fill, m!Hawke is also okay. I do love me some slash as well as het, but I just picture this being all the more torturous (or, you know, arousing) for Fenris with f!Hawke's lovely curvy hips and soft breasts~. XD_

WHAT IS THIS FIC. It was _supposed _to be a microfill, and then it kept growing, and now I don't even know what it is except that it doesn't have any real smut. I-I apologize in advance for the bathos.

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**Rencontre**  
>by Charles Jean Grandmougin<p>

_J'étais triste et pensif quand je t'ai rencontrée,_  
><em>Je sens moins aujourd'hui mon obstiné tourment;<em>  
><em>Ô dis-moi, serais-tu la femme inespérée,<em>  
><em>Et le rêve idéal poursuivi vainement?<em>  
><em>Ô, passante aux doux yeux, serais-tu donc l'amie<em>  
><em>Qui rendrait le bonheur au poète isolé,<em>  
><em>Et vas-tu rayonner sur mon âme affermie,<em>  
><em>Comme le ciel natal sur un coeur d'exilé?<em>  
><em>Ta tristesse sauvage, à la mienne pareille,<em>  
><em>Aime à voir le soleil décliner sur la mer!<em>  
><em>Devant l'immensité ton extase s'éveille,<em>  
><em>Et le charme des soirs à ta belle âme est cher;<em>  
><em>Une mystérieuse et douce sympathie<em>  
><em>Déjà m'enchaîne à toi comme un vivant lien,<em>  
><em>Et mon âme frémit, par l'amour envahie,<em>  
><em>Et mon coeur te chérit sans te connaître bien!<em>

_I was sad and pensive when I met you,_  
><em>I sense less to-day my persistent torment;<em>  
><em>Tell me, were you the girl I met by chance<em>  
><em>the ideal dream I have vainly sought?<em>  
><em>A passer-by with gentle eyes, were you the friend<em>  
><em>who brought happiness to a lonely poet,<em>  
><em>and did you shine upon my vacant heart<em>  
><em>like the native sky on an exiled spirit?<em>  
><em>Your shy sadness, so like my own,<em>  
><em>loves to watch the sun set over the sea!<em>  
><em>Your delight is awakened before its immensity,<em>  
><em>and the evenings spent with your lovely soul are dear to me.<em>  
><em>A mysterious and gentle sympathy<em>  
><em>already binds me to you like a living bond;<em>  
><em>my soul trembles with overpowering love,<em>  
><em>and my heart cherishes you, knowing you hardly at all!<em>

_.  
><em>

_.  
><em>

the native sky on an exiled spirit

.

.

The first time Fenris meets Hawke, she hits him in the face with her staff. She doesn't mean to, of course—Danarius's mansion is poorly lit in the evenings, and she's rather hard-pressed by a shade at the moment—but it is a rather emphatic point on her magic, and her sincere apology after the battle provides no solace, especially as she accompanies it with an offer of _more magic_ to heal him.

They part with mutual annoyance. It only gets worse from there.

.

.

Fenris learns after a very short acquaintance that Hawke is not clumsy but _careless_, and careless to a degree that astonishes him. She does not lack grace when she pays the proper attention to her motions—indeed, when she is focused in battle she carries herself as smoothly as any warrior might—but the moment she is distracted, either by a companion's words or an unlocked chest or once, even a particularly repulsive set of robes half-hidden in a barrel, she becomes as unconscious of her movements as a child. Twice in the first week she walks into Fenris's back, not aware he has stopped; in the first month alone she bumps into no less than eight doorjambs, saved from a higher number only by Fenris or her other friends prodding her around it at the last moment, and when he finds himself too close to her on an expedition to Sundermount, she hits him with her staff again. It's not that she _means_ to do it, he is sure, which is the only reason he is not more irritated—her head is simply always turned the wrong way, whether she is speaking to those beside her, or surveying a battlefield, or just looking back to glance at him.

Fenris even tries to speak to her brother about it, once, in a fit of misguided pity for the woman he is so indebted to. Carver scoffs and shakes his head. "She's always been like this," he says, as if the point is sore with him as well, but he seems resigned to it and unconcerned besides, and when it is clear that Fenris may expect no help from him, he is forced to settle for scowls and hopeless rebukes.

Careless with her motions, careless with her words, with her _magic_—he cannot count the number of times he sees her fling a fireball under the very nose of a templar, nor understand how easily she carries her staff within the grim walls of the Gallows. The abomination sees him frown at the sight, once—and he, too, is a choice of hers that infuriates him with its recklessness—and tells him that all mages should have the same freedom. Fenris watches Hawke idly toss sparks at a templar's armored back and wonders privately if even she ought to have it.

.

.

Hawke is also far too free with her feelings, as Fenris discovers shortly after he stops her walking blindly out over a steep stairway in Lowtown.

"You're _quick,_" she says, surprised, and Fenris shrugs. It is true enough, after all, and worth little enough notice in his opinion; it is what she says next that so astonishes him. "You're always saving me, you know, from little things like this. I think that's very sweet of you."

Sweet? _Sweet?_ Never in his _life_—he can feel his mouth hanging open but his words have vanished, fluttered away from him like so many startled birds. "I'm…I'm sorry?" he manages at last, and Hawke puts her hand on his arm.

Her fingers rest just above his vanbrace, the tips of her fingers soft and strikingly warm on his bare skin; a distant part of him wonders if that is an effect of her fire magic, or if all Fereldans are such natural furnaces. "It's a compliment," she says, her voice matter-of-fact, as if Fenris ought to be used to hearing such things. "You ought to know—"

"What's the hold-up?" Varric asks, poking his head around the corner at the bottom of the stairs; Aveline rounds the corner fully, looking up at them with impatience. Fenris closes his mouth with a clack, crossing his arms over his chest, and Hawke's hand falls away.

"I was just telling Fenris how attractive he is," Hawke calls back, and Fenris chokes.

Varric guffaws and even Aveline smiles as Hawke trips her way down the staircase. Fenris follows at a safe distance, refusing to meet anyone's eyes, his ears burning more hotly than any fireball ever could.

.

.

Fenris does not accompany them into the Deep Roads.

It is a tactical decision and one he approves of; Carver desperately wants to go, to prove himself, and Hawke agrees to it as easily as she does to everything. She takes Aveline, too, as her other swordsman, and as Varric's brother is the expedition leader the dwarf is rather obliged to go along. "So we're full up," she tells him the night before, just after she trips over a loose board in The Hanged Man and into his chest. Fenris shrugs as he sets her back on her feet, unoffended; Carver is skilled enough, though brash, and with Hawke's healing magic they will have no need of the abomination. For that alone he would not object; that he does not have to spend two weeks underground in squalid, claustrophobic tunnels is a mere bonus. "Well, so long," she says, brushing her hair out of her eyes, and just like that, they are parted.

She smiles at him as she leaves. Carver, her tall shadow, follows behind her.

Fenris finds himself thinking of that smile often while she is gone. His mansion seems quieter than usual, almost _empty _without her shouting into its echoes nearly every other day, wanting him to go with her on some inane task inevitably proving to be far more trouble than necessary for people far too ungrateful for her help. A week passes, and then ten days; he sharpens his sword and thinks of her fingers on his arm before he can stop himself. His mind jumps to the softness of her hands, a harsh contrast to his own thick calluses; to how small her waist is with his arm around it, pulling her out of the way of some enormous spider.

He finds himself wondering if she can go even five days without walking into something. In the quiet of his mansion he makes a private bet with himself, without terms, and pretends he does not notice that he can't decide if he wishes more to win or lose.

.

.

The two weeks pass. Hawke does not return.

Fenris does not worry at first, but when the two stretches to three and he still hears nothing, he grows concerned; when the first rumor reaches him that Bartrand has returned without his partners, he grows truly uneasy. When desperation drives him at last to Anders's clinic in the refuse of Darktown, the abomination's words are as unwelcome as his obvious anxiety.

"None of the passages I marked could possibly take this much time to navigate," he says. "I can only think of two things that would keep Hawke away so long: treachery, or death."

His heart stutters in his chest—his fault! His fault, for giving her the maps!—and the next words snarl out of him. "Then I will know where to come, _mage_," he spits, "if she does not return."

"If she doesn't come back in three days," Anders tells him, his tired eyes resolute, "then I'm going in after her."

"I go with you," Fenris says, and stalks from the clinic.

He is surprised to find that he is frightened.

.

.

Hawke comes back. Isabela pounds on the door of his mansion in the early hours of the morning, shouting his name loud enough to wake the neighbors three houses down. Fenris answers the door in his leggings, sword ever-present in his hand.

"Hawke's back," Isabela tells him, not sparing the slightest glance at his bare chest.

Fenris thinks of the abomination's words. His hand tightens on the hilt. "What kept her away, then? Treachery, or death?"

Isabela's mouth tightens. "Both."

.

.

Carver is dead in the Deep Roads, Bartrand's betrayal consigning his body to the flames there that do not die. Hawke he does not see for another week, shut up with her mother and their grief, and he thinks again of the last smile she'd given him, of Carver's shadow falling across the door, wondering how he could have allowed this death to happen. He does not approach them, and neither do her other companions save Aveline; this sorrow is a private thing he cannot touch, a thing not meant for him to stain with the callousness of his sympathy, no matter how deeply he feels it.

Varric will not speak of it.

Anders throws himself into his clinic; Merrill flickers from friend to friend, lost; Isabela disappears for two days and comes back smelling like wool and spices. Fenris stays in his mansion, waiting to be called. Hoping—

One day, she comes, her voice as loud in his foyer as always. "Fenris!" she shouts, no trace of tears in her throat. "I need you! There's a thing on the Coast, and I need you!"

He emerges from a side room and she looks at him, her staff on her back as always, her smile in place as always. Fenris walks towards her and she comes to meet him, and he draws close just as she trips on the broken flagstone he keeps forgetting to fix.

He catches her.

.

.

Time passes. Hawke uses the proceeds of her doomed expedition to buy her mother's mansion; two dwarves Fenris has seen hocking goods in the market move in as her manservants. The people grow more agitated as the qunari continue their placid occupation of the docks, though Hawke, as always, manages to soothe the worst of the tension with a charmingly direct word or two. Hawke grows friendlier than ever with both the viscount's son and the abomination, and Fenris chooses not to wonder why this agitates him so badly. She is happy; she is safe; he may be content with that.

Even so, Hawke is still as careless as she has ever been. Her staff still hangs proudly on her back and she spares just as little thought for the templars patrolling the streets; twice more she compliments him directly, once on his swordsmanship and once on his hair, and both times he fumbles for words while their companions laugh at him. She still walks into the open space at the top of the stairs and Fenris still stops her; she still knocks into too many doorjambs unless he nudges her in the right direction. Her hands move so enthusiastically when she speaks that she hits anyone she walks beside—though as of late, it seems to be Fenris more often than any other. He snaps, she laughs; he bats away her hands and she touches him on purpose, just to see him squirm.

He tells her of the Fog Warriors. She drinks his wine. Halfway through the second bottle, she forgets he has given her a wineglass and her elbow knocks it to the floor; they clean it up together, and when their hands brush, she does not shy away from the blood on them, and he does not shy away from the magic on hers.

Her fingers are still warm.

.

.

Hadriana comes for him. Fenris reaches into her chest and pulls out her heart, like slaughtering a pig.

The sight of her body pleases him, but the pleasure does not last long. Hawke sees him do this, sees the filth in his soul and the hate in his face. She tries to touch him but he cannot bear that touch now, to have to endure the pity he knows he will see in her eyes. He tucks his hate safely into his heart and flees.

.

.

Fenris spends hours wandering aimlessly around Kirkwall. Night falls without his noticing; the Chantry bells chime nine; the guard changes with a call. The world washes over him in a pleasant hum and when he finds himself stopping at Hawke's door, he opens it without thinking and waits for her.

She comes home. The sight of her steals his words from his mind—she looks worried, and tired, though the smile she gives him washes those away—and before he knows it, he spills his hate into her hands like a river, staining them as deeply as his own. Fenris turns away in the end, ashamed, but her hand comes out, wraps around his arm—

And he _reacts. _He throws her into the wall like an animal.

Hawke's eyes are wide in surprise. Fenris draws back, appalled at himself, but before he can escape her eyes narrow in that single-minded focus he has only ever seen from her on the battlefield, and she kisses him.

This shocks him into stillness as much as what follows; she turns _him_ to the wall, her body pressed full against his, and when her arms come round his neck he crushes her against his chest, too unsteady to question her, too eager for this gift for gentleness. _Here_ is her grace; _here_ is her elegance—she is deliberate in this embrace like he has never seen her before, and when she draws him upstairs he does not resist. Her hands are warm, her mouth _hot_, and her fingers pull over the markings in his skin to leave him scalded. They vie for dominance on her bed and she laughs, breathless; she is quick, but he is quicker, and yet her touches disarm him as they never have before. There is a spell being woven over him older than any magic Hawke might carry; in this moment she is almost otherworldly, lithe, and agile, with not a single misplaced movement of her fingers as she grazes his jaw, in her arms as she pulls him closer to herself, as at last she bends and bows at his touch and he follows her over.

He buries his head in her shoulder, overwhelmed, but she refuses to allow him to hide; her hands cup his face, drawing his eyes to hers; she smiles and kisses him again, and he feels nothing but tenderness in her touch.

She sleeps; he dreams of faces and names and words; he _remembers._

She wakes.

He runs.

.

.

Fenris avoids her for many days. He is a coward; he is _worse _than a coward; he ties her crest on his hip and her ribbon on his wrist, so that he might see these things and remember his cowardice. If Hawke notices, the rare times she catches him in the Hanged Man or on the streets of Kirkwall, she says nothing, and she does not smile at him. It is no less than he deserves, he thinks.

At the end of it, she is the one who comes to him. He does not know if it could have happened any other way.

"Fenris!" she shouts, her voice filling up his mansion. "The qunari are being—well, qunari, but nobody likes it. I need you!"

He emerges from his room and looks down at her over the railing; her eyes are steady, and she smiles, though it carries a shadow he does not remember. Isabela and Varric stand behind her with crossed arms and undisguised interest.

He stares too long, and Hawke cants her head with impatience. "Will you come?"

Fenris says, "Yes."

.

.

She does not touch him anymore. It hurts more than he expects.

.

.

A new sort of routine falls into place. Hawke pays as little attention to her surroundings as ever, but he does not reach for her now; the others watch the doorjambs for her, and Anders stops her careless feet at the stairs. Fenris treasures up the pain, keeps every smile she gives the abomination close to his heart, a barbed penance to remind him of his folly. Her stories she tells to others who walk beside her, now, not to him, though she is unsure enough that she looks back at him every once in a while to be certain he has not abandoned her again. Fenris considers that just.

Isabela offers him advice and he ignores it. Aveline throws him stern looks and he ignores those too, but when even Varric draws him aside like a caring uncle and starts, "Now, elf, if there's something you need to talk about—" Fenris snaps at him so sharply that they seem to take the hint and leave him alone.

Hawke, however, speaks to him as much as she ever did. He wonders if she is trying to be cruel or to be kind.

.

.

They trek up Sundermount and down it in the worst weather Kirkwall has seen in seasons. Rain puddles in the neck of his armor and mud squishes between his toes; Hawke's hair keeps poking out from under her hood, plastered to her face with the rivulets of water tracking down her cheeks, but her spirits are as undampened as ever. She and Isabela trade stories of Fereldan storms that would shame this squall and Merrill laughs to hear them. Fenris trails behind them like a sodden shadow, his mood darkening with every cheerful word, with every misplaced footstep that has Isabela chuckling as she pulls Hawke yet again from the mud.

Near the peak of the mountain the trail steepens, the stones on the path slicker from years of wind and water. Perhaps Fenris should have expected it, given her habits, but he is caught off-guard all the same when Hawke turns to speak to him and her foot comes down wrong on a loose, rain-smoothed rock. Her staff goes one way and she goes the other, and he has mind enough only to register the look of true surprise on her face before her fall leans her out over the edge of the cliff into empty space.

His hand clamps around her wrist and he _pulls, _and when she staggers safely into his chest it takes his breath away as easily as a blow. They stand there only a moment before she pushes away from him as soon as she can with a nod of thanks, and then they continue up the mountain, though she keeps close to the cliff's face after that. The rain still patters down around them, but even as far behind her as he is, Fenris can still hear her sharp breaths, the hissing gasps of a woman who has burned herself. When she thinks he is not looking, she rubs her wrist as if it aches.

Merrill asks her for the arulin'holm. Hawke agrees, as she always agrees, and the witch throws her arms around Hawke's neck in gratitude; Hawke laughs, surprised, but returns the embrace with careless arms until her thankful nonsense slows, and when Merrill pulls back, Hawke brushes her damp hair out of her eyes for her.

Fenris turns away.

.

.

Hawke's mother disappears.

Fenris is with her when she finds the lilies, and Varric and Aveline as well. He has only met Leandra a few times, but he remembers her fondly enough; besides, she is Hawke's mother. This alone is enough to spur him into action.

They find a trail of blood in the streets of Lowtown. Hawke moves with sure steps and a single-minded focus. Her feet are careful, her hands quick and steady; Fenris sees Aveline and Varric glancing sidelong at her sudden litheness, but Fenris does not wonder at it—he knows what her focus brings, after all. The trail leads to a foundry deep in Lowtown's unlit streets; it is a place they have visited before, and when Fenris realizes it, he looks immediately to Hawke. Her face is hard and she does not meet his eyes, and rather than waste time speaking, they fight their way into her nightmares.

Her mother dies anyway.

Hawke's mother dies in one of the most gruesome, horrifying ways he can imagine, even with his history in Tevinter, and when it is over, the thing that had once been Leandra gasps its way to death in her daughter's arms. Fenris crushes Quentin's dead chest with his heel, furious and anguished and _helpless_. A rib cracks loud in the silence, and Hawke bends over her mother and does not move.

Aveline excuses herself, tears running down her own face; when she returns she brings guardsmen with white linen sheets, and it is she, not Fenris, who pulls Hawke away from her mother's body, who holds Hawke, white-faced and trembling, close to her as they leave the foundry. It is Aveline who guides Hawke, who still does not speak, who does not cry, through the streets of Hightown to her home; it is Aveline who maneuvers Hawke upstairs, who helps her after she trips on every single step, who nudges her out of her bloodied robes and into a clean one.

It is Aveline who comes downstairs to find Fenris staring into Hawke's fire, his arms crossed so tightly over his chest that the ridges of his gauntlets nearly draw blood. She joins him, her blood-specked hair burning copper in the firelight, and sighs. "I'm tired," she says at last. "And this shouldn't have happened." She turns away from the fire and looks at him, and Fenris sees that her eyes are reddened with tears and exhaustion. "Go, or don't, Fenris. But make up your mind, because my patience is growing thin."

He jerks a tight nod. Aveline puts her hand on his arm as she leaves, and the metal of her glove is cold, like ice.

.

.

He goes upstairs. Hawke is bent over on the side of her bed, her hair loose around her face. She does not move. He says something, clumsy and awkward and loud in the silence, and approaches; she turns her head just enough to see him, then bends over her hands again. He does not know what to say to this lifeless Hawke, this ever-moving woman made statue-still by the potency of her grief.

The bed dips as he sits beside her, ungainly in his uncertainty, unsure of his boundaries and hesitant to overstep them. Still she does not move either to reject or encourage him, but that in itself he finds encouraging; before he can talk himself out of it, he reaches out and takes her hand in his. It is not a delicate motion, nor is it a gentle one—he is neither of those things, even now—but she lets her hand be taken, and she watches as he folds her frozen fingers between his own to warm them.

Hawke blinks, and tears spill from her eyes. She weeps for a long time, and Fenris holds her until she stops.

.

.

It takes many days before Hawke joins them in The Hanged Man, and more before she smiles again, but something changes between them all the same. The first day they go out to the Wounded Coast, Hawke walks into a jutting boulder and recoils into his chest. Fenris catches her without thinking, his fingers curling around her arms. Hawke straightens and says, "Thank you."

After this, she touches him again.

.

.

Isabela betrays them to the qunari.

She comes back with the Tome of Koslun tucked under one arm like so much baggage after the city has torn itself apart, and naturally, Hawke is as delighted to see her as if the Tome were an armload of lyrium. Both of them are surprised when this is not enough for the Arishok; Fenris is _not_ surprised when Hawke agrees without thought to the duel he proposes in exchange. Never has she thought things through, never has she been so _careless._ They circle each other with terrifying caution before they strike the first blow; they spin and weave like ludicrous dancers, Hawke flitting away just before the Arishok's blade falls, the Arishok spinning just out of the way of her fireballs. They catch glancing blows off each other, neither enough to truly distract the other, and then Hawke glances at Fenris stone-faced on the stairs and trips on a wrinkle in the carpet.

The Arishok spits her clean through on his sword and hoists her in the air like a newly-caught specimen he wishes to inspect. Hawke's weight drives her body further down the blade and she gasps for air, one hand sliding along the metal edge in a futile attempt to stabilize herself. The edges of Fenris's vision go black. He is not aware his sword is in his hand until Varric clamps down on his wrist; Hawke drags in a tortured breath and his own comes no easier—his heart is splitting in his chest as surely as her own must be—the Arishok brings her eye-to-eye—

And then Hawke reaches out with two fingers, just brushing his open mouth, and lightning explodes out of the back of the Arishok's head. The giant falls, slowly at first and then faster, as a tree falls, his sword slipping from his nerveless hand, and then he dies. Hawke goes to her knees, the hilt of the sword catching on the body of the Arishok to prop her up in mock obeisance. Anders flings himself to the ground beside her as the crowd erupts around them, shouts of alarm and victory mingling in the smoke-thick air. None of them seems to care that she is a mage, that Anders's white healing light is pooling around her as obvious as any sun.

Fenris watches the color flush back into Hawke's cheeks as a pale Isabela eases out the sword, inch by excruciating inch, as Hawke lets out cries of agony at each movement. Her eyelids flutter as she gives Anders a weak grin, and then she looks at _him._ Fenris braces himself for—something—but Hawke, white-faced and trembling and skewered by a sword as long as she is—has the temerity to _wink._

He is at her side before he is conscious of moving, his mouth open to say something cutting in response, but her eyes have closed again and the words die in his throat. Behind him Varric corrals the idiot nobles into something sensible and orderly; Anders murmurs to Isabela and she slides the last exposed inch of the sword into Hawke's back. She twitches and bites back a miserable cry, and Fenris crouches, tearing the gauntlets from his hands in order to take hers from their fists. Her hand clenches around his so tightly his bones rub together, but he does not begrudge her the pain in the slightest.

"Fenris," she says through tight lips that, even now, still try to curve into a smile. "I would really like to be unconscious right now."

"You fought well," he offers, and Hawke lets out an explosive laugh that jerks the sword from Isabela's hands; the last of it falls free, thumping to the carpet with a dead, heavy sound. It seems like so much metal to have been in Hawke's body.

"I fought like an _idiot!_" she tells him through the new wash of pain. "What a stupid way to die. Tripping on a carpet."

"You are not dying," Fenris says, though the thought of it makes his stomach turn over.

"Yes, well, neither are you." Her hand relaxes on his own as Anders finishes the last of his emergency healing. Fenris's fingers are numb and white. "So stop looking like it."

He closes his eyes. "I am glad you are not dead, Hawke," he says.

She squeezes his hand as she slips into unconsciousness at last. "Me too."

.

.

Hawke sleeps for nearly a week. Anders stays at her side for most of that time, and after that, there is a veritable mountain of paperwork to declare her the city's official Champion and, Fenris suspects, to smooth over the use of her magic. After that there are congratulatory feasts, and welcoming balls, and eligible courtiers calling day in and day out, and between the dances and her healing Fenris does not see Hawke for more than ten minutes for nearly a month.

So he stays in his mansion, and he dreams of Hawke tripping into his chest, and touching his arm, and being lifted into the air by a sword.

.

.

Time passes. Hawke heals, Fenris dreams less, and the interminable balls grow more infrequent. The Champion grows more popular with the people and less so with the Knight-Commander and First Enchanter, though Hawke still does her level best to keep what peace is left to them. Aveline marries. Hawke and Fenris both attend and with neither of them in mortal peril, the awkwardness is excruciating; Varric gives them glasses of champagne and politely asks them to excuse themselves before the bride does it herself. Fenris drinks another bottle of the Agreggio Pavali and writes to what might be his sister; Hawke traipses around the coast with Isabela and Merrill, tossing around careless bits of magic and making absolutely no progress against its neverending spider infestation. Anders throws himself into his clinic, desperate to save every soul he can; Fenris despairs every time Hawke offers him her help with a smile.

They don't speak of what happened between them. Their peace is tentative enough, Fenris tells himself. There is no need to add his confusion to Hawke's growing list of troubles.

Sometimes he almost believes this.

.

.

She starts coming to his mansion at night. Sometimes she reads, and sometimes he reads to her; sometimes she tells him stories of her family that has both of them laughing into the early hours of the morning. She does not touch him, these nights, and she does not stay, but it is less an aversion and more as if she does not wish to tempt him—or herself.

.

.

Meredith asks the Champion to track down rogue mages. Hawke agrees, naturally, though Fenris sees how her eyes turn again and again to the Tranquil Meredith keeps leashed at her side. The first man is biddable enough; it is the second and the third that turn to battle. When the last of them falls, her gaze on his body turns distant, and she does not hear Fenris call her name; he calls again and still she does not answer, and as he approaches her she sighs and moves to replace her staff at her back.

Her staff hits Fenris in the face.

He staggers back, shocked, and Hawke turns in surprise and embarrassment as he touches his cheek. "I'm _sorry!_" she cries even as Isabela snickers behind them, and though he waves it away she still pulls his hand from his face and replaces it with her own.

"I really didn't mean to do that," she tells him, and her fingers are warm on his skin. "You're much handsomer when I'm not knocking you about the face."

.

.

His sister comes.

Danarius comes with her.

.

.

The battle itself is a blur. He knows Varania betrays him; he knows Danarius emerges like a beast from his nightmares and mocks him before Hawke, making his face burn with shame; he knows Hawke touches his arm and says _Fenris is not a slave_ as if it is an unquestioned truth, as if she herself has never doubted it. He knows that the fight seems to go on, and on, and on, and still every time he looks Hawke stands steady and strong, her hands gleaming with magic on _his_ behalf, for _his _sake, and he does not try to check the wild thing surging in his chest.

Danarius's heart bursts in his hand. He remembers _that._

_._

_.  
><em>

Hawke tells him not to kill his sister, so he does not; in turn, Varania takes from him the last of his certainties, and when she flees she leaves him with—nothing.

"You have _me_," Hawke says.

Another truth.

.

.

He goes home to his mansion and waits—for what, he isn't sure. Isabela comes by and drinks and offers him a berth on her ship, but he declines; it feels too much like running, and somehow, he feels as though he has run enough. Twilight falls; she leaves and Hawke comes, her eyes tired and her mouth smiling. Her hip bumps into a table as she approaches and he steadies her without thought, and when she pulls away to sit his hands feel almost empty. They speak of Danarius, of his freedom, of his _future_—all things they have shied away from in the past, and when the conversation lulls at last near midnight Hawke looks at him with something in her face that stops him from speaking again.

"Fenris," she says, and as soft as her voice is it fills the room, fills his mansion from floor to ceiling, drowning him in the sound. "I need you."

His heart pounds in his chest, but he will not assume— "For what?"

Her mouth twists wryly as she fiddles with her thumbnail, but her gaze is clear and her heart bared in her eyes. "Just you."

His heart stops.

Again—_again_ she freely gives him this, again she offers a gift too precious to accept. Shades of his old cowardice needle up his back, whispering _slave_ and _abandoner_ and _vicious_, and yet Hawke stands with him still, Hawke who has let him save her a hundred times, a thousand times without fear; Hawke, who trusts him to catch her when she falls.

Before his fear masters him again, he stands, and Fenris tells Hawke everything that has plagued him since the night he first abandoned her. He speaks, she listens; he apologizes, and she shakes her head as if no apology is necessary, as if she has always understood him better than he did himself. It ends with him bent over her on the chair, her lips parted, waiting for the last push that will carry them both. He knows that it must be his, that he must accept this proffered happiness with his own two hands, no matter how stained they might be, no matter how much he fears staining her with them. Hawke waits, very still, for his answer.

Ah, but he has run enough.

.

.

He kisses her. It is the flicker of a moment and the span of a lifetime, and when she draws back his fingers are tangled in her hair and her forehead is hot against his own.

"I missed you," she whispers, her breath ghosting across his skin, and the words that swell in his throat are too much, too great for a new-freed man to say aloud. He does his best to say them with his touch instead, with his arms as he pulls her closer, with his fingers as he holds her face close to his own. She seems to understand all the same; she kisses him again, and again, and when he draws her down with him before the fire, she moves with that same easy grace that he has seen in her so rarely. Here is the deliberation in her movements that he has so sorely missed; here again is her elegance as she traces her fingers over his markings, as if seeking to memorize what he hid away from her for so long, as if she cannot touch him enough. He wishes he could tell her that she does not need to fear his leaving, that this choice of his will not be unmade—but that assurance is not his to give after what he has done before, so instead he pulls her even nearer, burning with her heat, curving his back to match hers as she bends to meet him.

In the end, she says his name into his mouth. It is both impulsive and intent, artless and determined, and the sound of it nearly overpowers him.

For a long time they lie there, lazy in the glow of the fire, and then when Hawke begins to yawn he draws a blanket over their shoulders. She curls into his chest, her fingers tapping a careless rhythm against his heart; occasionally Fenris kisses her, just because he can.

She sleeps. So does he.

Dawn finds them together.

.

.

Time passes. Hawke's distractions become nearly incorrigible; he loses count of the times she walks into his back in a supposed accident, only to rest her chin on his shoulder and press a kiss to his cheek. Every doorway they pass through becomes an open threat to Hawke's elbows if Fenris is not there to pull her through it properly, and every time she walks beside him her hip nudges his too frequently for innocent mistakes. Isabela teases them unceasingly and Aveline looks torn between disapproval and gladness—Anders, naturally, suffers no such qualms—and even Merrill musters the gall to pat him on the arm and accuse him of _love. _Varric simply makes notes every time Hawke touches him—which, as it turns out, is more often than ever.

In fact, he rather begins to wonder if she has ever been as truly clumsy as she has allowed him to believe.

"Yes," she tells him when he asks, "and no." The Hightown streets are quiet tonight, most of the city asleep, and only a distant thrush calling across the streets breaks the silence. "I _might_ have exaggerated it a little in the beginning."

"A little?"

She laughs. "You were so prickly! And _so _unhappy. And I thought if I could open you up you might be less of a…well."

"Less of a…what?" He raises an eyebrow. Hawke loops her arm through his as much for her reassurance as his.

"Fenris," she says, her voice grave and her face as stern as if she imparts the worst news she can imagine. "I am sorry to be the one to tell you this, but I must say that on occasion, you are, frankly, something of a curmudgeon."

He turns his head away, but he cannot hide the quiet laugh that slips out of him. "I've been called worse, Hawke."

"Not by me."

"True."

They fall silent, listening to the singing thrush as they make their way through the streets. Her fingers curl around his arm in a steady heat, and Fenris finds himself glancing at her more than once; her face looks calm and peaceful, the smile turning up her mouth untouched by grief or sorrow, the faint light of the stars catching in her hair, in her eyes. She looks—she looks—

She looks startled beyond measure, and she yanks _hard_ on his arm. Fenris staggers back, thoroughly unbalanced, and he missteps in that instability; his weight goes sideways, and he ends up nearly knocking Hawke into the white stone wall that towers over them, the stone wall that marks—

The stone wall that marks the top of the long stairs down to the market.

Hawke leans her head back against the stone wall, nearly crying from her breathless laughter. "You—you did that on purpose."

"I did not," he says, rueful, and braces one hand over her on the wall, covering his eyes with the other. He'd stepped out into empty space, as simple as that; if Hawke hadn't been watching his feet as well as her own, he'd have gone head over heels down the stairs, and worse, he might have dragged Hawke with him.

He drops his hand, chagrined, and she cups his face in her hands. "You see?"

Her eyes are still alight with mirth, her face still flushed as she shakes her head. Her thumb strokes over his cheek and Fenris feels something different take root in his chest; he raises his other hand to the wall and leans in, trapping her between his arms. "I see," he says, and his voice is low enough he barely recognizes it. She grins and he steals a kiss; he draws back and she pulls him closer, her fingers sliding to his jaw, both of them quiet in the soft shadows of Kirkwall's evening.

A faint breeze picks up, carrying with it the gentle peace of a city unwinding for the night—the smoky smell of a hearth-fire being lit nearby; the low, glad voices of men and women returning home.

"I rather like this," Hawke murmurs when they stop at last, when the thrush finishes its song and the night's watchmen begin to call distant greetings to each other.

"Hmm?"

She tugs at the hair over his eyes. "Catching you, I mean. Saving you from falling."

Ah, but she's done that times without number; he cannot count how often she's caught him without realizing. Fenris bends to kiss her again—he will show her, later, precisely how she has saved him, but for now, as Hawke's fingers slide warm and tender to his neck, he settles for the simplest truth he can manage.

.

.

"I am yours," he says, and he is.


End file.
